Let Go, Mets

The joys and boos of rooting for that other team.

Baseball never seems serious until along about Memorial Day, but this time the early stuff has felt like a soap. Seven weeks into the season, the Yankees’ newborn television network, YES, and Cablevision have contrived to block three million customers from catching any of a scheduled hundred and thirty games over their home sets, because of a fee squabble. The Red Sox, under new ownership and an amiable new manager (Grady Little), who says that he plans never to go to sleep mad at any of his players, have sailed off to a 26-9 start, the best record in either league. Earlier, baseball commissioner Bud Selig reminded owners that a million-dollar fine would be levied against the club of any official heard to utter a single word or groan about labor issues during the current negotiations with the Players Association over the sport’s expired basic agreement. (He didn’t mention a finder’s fee if a breach should occur, but if that is in the books—well, Bud, you have my number.) The Pirates, losers of a hundred games last year, raised their ticket prices for the new season; in April they found themselves unexpectedly and briefly at the top of the National League Central Division, even as their attendance headed in the other direction. Speaking of tickets, a friend of a friend of mine called the Yankees the other day to ask about the availability of good seats for a Thursday, July 18th, game against the Tigers, and was told sure, there were some left, and did he want the order at $47 or $55 or $65 per? Maybe the fan should hop out to the Giants’ Pacific Bell Park, where he might still catch Barry Bonds from a nice $28 box behind home. Hurry.

The Minnesota Twins, originally targeted for termination before the start of this season by Commissioner Selig, have held on to first place in the American League Central, while the Montreal Expos, the other Dead Team Walking, were for a time leading or nearly leading the frail National League East. With things as they are, this counts as great—or semi-ironic, reverse-popular great—news for the commissioner, whose own club, the Milwaukee Brewers (operated for the present by his daughter, Wendy Selig-Prieb), is in the cellar of the N.L. Central. The Brewers, who play in a new stadium, Miller Park, built at taxpayers’ expense, are not on Selig’s schedule for possible “contraction,” as the end of franchise life is euphemistically known.

Meantime, in another part of town, John Rocker, the hyper ex-Braves, ex-Indians reliever and No. 7 line subway critic, was briefly dispatched to the minors by his latest club, the Texas Rangers, after compiling a 9.53 earned-run average. “No! He was?” exclaimed Mets manager Bobby Valentine on being told the news. Mike Cameron, an outfielder with the Seattle Mariners, hit four home runs in one game, against the White Sox, becoming the eleventh man in modern baseball to pull off this feat. Lou Gehrig was the first. The Chicago pitchers responsible for the homers—Jon Rauch and Jim Parque—who’d thrown Cameron two fat pitches apiece, were dispatched to the minors after the game. Elsewhere, another pitcher, the Reds’ Jose Rijo—perhaps remembered as the M.V.P. of the 1990 World Series—won his first game in seven years (against the Cubs, on April 21st), after enduring five surgeries and a six-year absence from the majors.

Earlier in our story, Jeffrey Loria, the New York art-dealer owner of the Expos (who drew an average 7,935 spectators per home game last year), was permitted to trade up for a different low-interest (fans, not loans) club, the Florida Marlins. The Montreal front office, decimated by the transaction, is now staffed by Major League Baseball employees; this qualifies the ‘Spos’ new skipper, Frank Robinson, as the first commander of a baseball protectorate. Meantime, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, the World Champion Arizona Diamondbacks’ stellar starting duo last year (they went 21-6 and 22-6, respectively), started up where they left off, and stood at a cumulative 14-2 at last count. Johnson, pitching against the Colorado Rockies in his fifth start, gave up two hits and struck out seventeen. Three of his last four pitches were timed at a hundred miles an hour.

Barry Bonds, who hit a record seventy-three home runs last year, smacked two on the Giants’ Opening Day, and two more the next afternoon. That same week, a teammate, second baseman Jeff Kent, came off the disabled list, after nearly being fined thirty-seven thousand dollars per missed game by the Giants for violating a risk clause in his contract while incurring a pre-season wrist injury. Kent said he’d hurt himself while washing his truck, but eyewitnesses came forward to say they’d seen him crash while doing wheelies on his Harley. Thirty-seven thousand multiplied by a hundred and sixty-two games equals Kent’s salary of six million bucks—which remained intact when the Giants’ front office, like Tony Soprano the dad, lost its nerve at the last instant and forgave.

And, only recently, the Post contributed the tingling headline “MR. MET vs TALIBAN” . . . “Baseball mascot stationed at Gitmo.” Mr. Met, the Mets’ roving macrocephalic, had just celebrated his fortieth year on the job, at a Sunday date against the Expos, without any announcement that his inner self, an Army Reserve major named Lee Reynolds, was no longer with us, having been called up for duty at Guantánamo Bay. More on Mr. Met later.

My plan to spend a lot more time with the Mets this season has been rewarded, sort of. Once again, I have come to see that uncertainty and reversal are the everyday flavor of the game—a truth obscured or forgotten when you hang around the Yankees. Last year, the Mets were second worst in batting in the National League, worst in runs scored and slugging average, and first, in a close contest, in ennui. All that would end with their expensive off-season acquisition of Mo Vaughn, the eminent ex-Angels and ex-Red Sox first baseman-slugger, and the perennial All Star Robbie Alomar, by consensus the best second baseman of our epoch. The infield, where Edgardo Alfonzo had been shifted from second base to third, would be the Mets’ best in a long time. The starting pitching, according to my winter Mets party line, was up in the air, given the three new starters Pedro Astacio, Jeff D’Amico, and Shawn Estes, who all came intriguingly decked out in accomplishment and physical frailty. The bullpen was a serious concern, given the continuing disablement of its archducal lefty, John Franco, after an elbow repair in December. Defense—well, no worry there, at least. The swift Roger Cedeño and the burgeoning (how long can you say “promising”?) Jay Payton, in center, would catch everything airborne, and perhaps even steal some bases at last.

Well, no: cancel the above. These Mets assumptions—every one of them—have turned out to be wrong. Mo Vaughn and Robbie Alomar have yet to get untracked at the plate, at this writing or waiting. (Some of Mo’s missing power has been attributed to his swinging a bat that was two or three ounces heavier than he thought it was: a baseball first, to me.) Cedeño circling and staggering under a long fly ball and then missing the catch and Payton mindlessly popping up on the first pitch have gnawed their way into my Mets consciousness, like Seaver’s fastball and Mookie Wilson’s hopper. The infield has been grotesquely awful in stretches and presumably cannot do worse: the club’s forty-six errors are the most in either league. The starting pitchers, by contrast, have been sound and can be counted—if you count the right way—among the better staffs around. In the pen, David Weathers, Grant Roberts, Scott Strickland, and Armando Benitez have proved hostile and unflappable. With a dog’s breakfast of team stats like this, the Mets couldn’t be expected to win—except that they won just enough to stay in first place in their division for two weeks running.

Nothing about these Mets remains true for long, which is why you watch them in action with a riveted and memorizing anxiety: Mo’s glowering gaze at the pitcher from behind the parapet of his right shoulder; Mo signing autographs for the Baha Men R. & B. group, with his low-pulled cap pushing out his ears; Al Leiter’s midgame clenched jaw and clenched mind; Joe McEwing’s balletic hoppings in the batter’s box, where he starts and finishes his swing on tiptoe; Alomar’s scary backhand flips of the ball from out of his glove; Mike Piazza’s cockily tilted helmet and ticking calm when he’s up at bat; Pedro Astacio waggling his drooping right hand on the mound like a fishing lure as he looks in for the sign; and Edgardo Alfonzo (the Met of Mets, to me) dropping the head of his bat on the away pitch and smoothly redirecting the ball—this time, anyway—for a single into right field. If you find all this in your mind’s eye at three-forty-five in the morning, you’ve renewed your license as a Mets fan and can come back the next day.

A reminder that Metsball can produce moments not elsewhere known to man arrived in an early-season Saturday game against the Expos, when Leiter, fielding a little sacrifice bunt, saw his routine toss over to the covering second baseman, Alomar, disappear in mid-flight, swallowed by an alien glove. It was a low-tech magic effect—you could see Leiter’s “Wha?” in the middle of it the same instant you heard your own. John Valentin, the old-pro infielder who came over from the Red Sox this year, was filling in for the day at first base, an unfamiliar corner to him. Hurrying toward the plate to field the expected bunt was absolutely the correct move for him, but, when the ball went to Leiter instead, Valentin backpedalled uncertainly and then stuck out his mitt as the toss to first arced past him—oop! Nobody in the stands or on the field had ever seen this mini-cutoff play before, but the splendor of it was lost on Leiter, who was quickly victimized by another infield error and six unearned Montreal runs. The next miscue belonged to Rey Ordóñez, the routinely impeccable Mets shortstop, who also dropped a relay, in the fourth, and, two innings later, flubbed a little four-hop grounder, for his third error of the day. Ordóñez, amid a scattering of embarrassed boos, stared uncomprehending at the ball lying at his feet. In 1999, he committed four errors during the entire season, and began a run of a hundred and one errorless games at the position, a string unmatched by any shortstop in major-league history. After the game was over—the Mets had rallied energetically, converting an 0-7 deficit into an eventual 8-7 lead, only to lose the thing in the eleventh, on a home run by the vibrant Montreal slugger Vladimir Guerrero—I drove home in a refreshed haze of Metsian wonder.

Ordóñez had slammed his mitt—a black Wilson A2000 model—against the clubhouse wall after the game, and then snipped the laces out of it with a pair of trainer’s scissors, making sure it would never clank again. This was more revenge than mojo, since he shifts to a fresh mitt every couple of weeks. Mo Vaughn and John Valentin, by contrast, have played with the same gloves for eight or nine years now—”I like things comfortable,” Mo said—and the mitts feel as if there’s more pine tar than leather to them by now. When Valentin let me grab hold of his for a minute, in the clubhouse, it grabbed me back.

Even in the midst of his troubles, Ordóñez continued to pull off dazzlingly difficult plays, including his patented stretching dive to the right, when he reaches across his body to backhand a scorching drive and at the same time drops to his right knee or extends the leg full-length, like a dancer flying into a split. This brings him to a skidding halt, with his body rising and turning in the same motion for the throw across the diamond; the left leg has trailed a fraction, opening his upper body enough to allow some steam on the peg. Nothing in modern baseball is prettier than this. It was the easier stuff that was giving him fits, that extra beat of time which told him and the rest of us how hard the work is after all.

I went back to Shea the day after the eleven-inning loss to the Expos, but this time sat jam-packed in the stands in short left, where patches of pale sunshine and mild booing (while Mets starter Steve Trachsel gave back an early 3-1 lead) and the shrilling of kiddie fans kept us cheerful. Fans in every style and vintage of Mets gear paraded up and down the aisles, and returning, view-blocking food-bearers, in ancient ritual, paused to ogle the field in response to the smallest hint of action. A busy dad in front of me missed Alomar’s first-inning homer while on forage, and then blew Robbie’s next dinger, in the third, when he’d gone down again for ice cream. Some mini-minors near me had to stand on their seats, teetering and peering—and sometimes grabbing my shirt or ear to keep balance—to catch fractional glimpses of the batter, way off to our right. Now and then one of the standees would step on the wrong part of his seat and disappear from view, like a wader taken down by a shark, but then resurface smiling, with peanut dust and bits of popcorn in his hair. The noise was amazing, and not much like the apprehensive or vengeful sounds of Yankee Stadium, where every game must be won.

These peewee fans enjoyed some between-inning gambollings by Mr. Met and a bunch of visiting mascots—the Phillie Phanatic, the Oakland white elephant, the Pirates’ parrot, the Padres’ tonsured friar, and others—here to help celebrate his ostensible fortieth anniversary. But I date back to the Polo Grounds era with this club, and recall Mr. Met’s predecessor, a beagle named Homer—a dog, I mean, and not a parade float. I am no fan of the Queens icon, holding that a stitched and grinning white ball is not the face of fun, but this time withheld complaint and even joined in speculative conversations about him in our loge sector. None of us knew as yet that the anima of Mr. Met was elsewhere, serving his country. But had not Mr. Met been known to add a tactful yarmulke to his getup in the past, on High Holy Day games? (I thought not.) And were these warmhearted visiting mascots the real thing, flown in for the afternoon from their distant home fields around the league, or were they untrained local talent, mere walk-ons under those outsized heads? (I took the cynical second view.) I didn’t know it, but the same Santa debate was being argued up in the first-base-side mezzanine at this very moment, by my Mets-fan friend Gerry and his ten-year-old son, Guy, who was shocked at his father’s suggestion that the mascot co-celebrants were not on the up and up. When the game ended—the Mets won it, 6-4—and they went home, someone turned on the Dodgers-Padres game, over ESPN, and there was the Padres’ Swinging Friar shaking his belly on Pacific Coast time. “Oh, Daad!” Guy said, crestfallen.

I was back among the grownups the next evening—well, back in the press box—for the best entertainment of the young season, an extended docudrama against the Atlanta Braves, unexpectedly captured by the Mets, 7-6, in twelve. The Braves have eaten the Mets’ lunch in recent years, while on the way to their brilliant run of ten straight post-season appearances, but this year’s edition has proved fallible and just now stood last in the National League East. The game, in any case, suspended speculation with its own news. Shawn Estes, the Mets lefty starter, was rocked for two homers and five runs in the second inning but permitted by Bobby Valentine to stay on through the fifth, while he recaptured his poise and his curveball. Mike Piazza had led off the Mets’ second inning with a homer to dead center field, and then did it again, farther and deeper, to start off the seventh. Doubles by Edgardo Alfonzo and Jeromy Burnitz now trimmed the Atlanta lead to 6-3, and Ordóñez, ordered to bunt on the first pitch, delivered Burnitz from third base on a delicious squeeze, with the runner crossing the plate untouched and no play at any base. “LetsgoMets!” . . . “LetsgoMets!” and here came John Valentin, up to bat in place of the pitcher, with a tying two-run shot, barely over the wall and a foot or two inside the left-field foul pole: his first pinch-hit homer in a ten-years-plus career. Stuff like this should be saved for September.

The Mets bullpen flingers had matters their way by now—they combined with Estes for what became a nine-inning midgame shutout, in fact—but Braves manager Bobby Cox slipped out of a pickle in the tenth, when he ordered a startling intentional pass to the dangerous Alfonzo, moving the winning run up to third base, before Jeromy Burnitz struck out to end the threat. The same situation came up again in the twelfth—you could hear the fans yammering about the coincidence—as Alfonzo again stepped in with runners at first and second. But this time Cox was down to a rookie pitcher named Gryboski, who could not be trusted to work with the bases loaded; Alfonzo rapped his third pitch to right-center for a single and the game.

Readers who infer a continuous cheering and optimism in the stands throughout this long test don’t understand Mets fans. When Armando Benitez, the large fireballer, came on in the tenth, he was welcomed with the low, round noises of discontent. Benitez was the best closer in the league last year, with forty-three saves and the Rolaids Relief Man award to prove it. Standing on the mound with his head tilted back a fraction, he stares down at the batter as if through reading glasses, and then delivers serious heat. He is affable in the clubhouse, but too often (for me, at least) appears to be drawing upon a boyish optimism while at work; even when he’s in serious difficulties you can see him checking out the illuminated, second-deck sign in short right field as it flashes the m.p.h. of his latest delivery. Benitez blew three saves along the way last year, two of them in critical late-season games against the Braves, hence the pitiless reminders. Here, in the unfamiliar role of holder, he held for his two innings, surrendering a bare single, and gave way to Scott Strickland, who got the win. Bobby Valentine is impatient with the Shea fans’ disloyalty to Armando—”The intelligence level could be greater,” he once muttered about them. On another day, he pointed out that the Giants didn’t make the playoffs last year, either, and that their closer, Robb Nen, blew seven saves. “What would happen if he was our guy?” Bobby said, shuddering.

The baseball skyline took on a different look on May 7th, when Barry Bonds came to town, with ten homers in tow. Already this year he had overtaken Harmon Killebrew, whose five hundred and seventy-three home runs had him in sixth place on the lifetime list, and was a few weeks or so away from Mark McGwire’s five hundred and eighty-three. Sometime before the summer, he will put away Frank Robinson’s fourth-best five hundred and eighty-six, and when the season is done he should be well into the six hundreds, an upland terrain heretofore occupied only by his godfather, Willie Mays. Ruth and Aaron are the last two peaks. From here on—everyone has been doing the arithmetic—the distance to Aaron’s all-time top seven hundred and fifty-five gets divided by Bonds’s age: he turns thirty-eight on July 24th. He is in great shape and hitting as well as he ever has, but four years at forty-five homers per will require his greatest performance.

We should not be distracted by a mere record, though. The news about Bonds is that he plays every day and still does it almost better than anyone else. Arriving at Shea, he was batting a league-leading .391, and also stood first in on-base percentage and slugging average—and walks. Bases on balls are boring, but they have become a daily reality for Bonds now, a dangling spear in his flank. Last year, he broke an ancient mark held by Babe Ruth when he walked a hundred and seventy-seven times, but with fifty free passes to date he’ll surpass that and then some; more than a third of his trips to the plate this year end in a free pass. Well-known batters get two or three good pitches to swing at in every game, but whatever Barry does at the plate these days comes on a far leaner menu.

The walks were on his mind during a pre-game press conference, when he said that all those early free trips this year had made it tougher to get his earlyseason swing adjusted. “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve gone through in my career,” he went on. “But I have the mentality and the focus to withstand it.” He said he was happy that the Giants had been in strong contention in recent years—if they’d been in last place it would have been devastating. Team-play references are reflexive P.R. for star players these days, but Bonds here unexpectedly began talking about Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson’s work in the World Series last fall, which he called the greatest pitching performance he’d ever seen. “But if Gonzalez doesn’t get that hit”—in the bottom of the ninth inning of the last game—”they would have lost. Their team won that World Series. . . . There’s no one person in baseball.”

Pressed about the Aaron record, Bonds said, “I don’t have enough games in my body to get there. I don’t have enough years with a hundred and seventy walks to get there.”

Bonds had his cap on backward during the press conference, above that jewelled-cross earring, and he spoke in the softly or grandly self-assured way that has irritated writers and fans throughout his career. Some baseball people I know believe that the accolade of “best player in baseball” widely bestowed upon Ken Griffey, Jr., a few years back was an intentional insult to Bonds, who has been persistently disliked and underrated. But there’s been an almost tectonic shift in view about him, which arises less from his maturity than from the at last acknowledged evidence that in him we have a dedicated team player, a superior outfielder and base stealer, and a four-time Most Valuable Player who must be placed among the handful of best players who ever lived. Bobby Valentine, responding to a question about Bonds’s presumed use of steroids in reaching his present strength and size, said, “Did they shoot steroids in his eyes?” And he brought up another tall left fielder, named Williams, and said, “If there’s one of those two that’s a little better than the other . . . well, my goodness.”

Friends of mine who resist such talk get to hear my favorite Bonds record. When he steals fourteen more bases—he’ll get around to this, for sure—he will take sole possession of the 500 Homers plus 500 Stolen Bases Club. (It’s always called a “club,” for some reason; think of this one as the Porcellian.) He is already in the 400 HRs-400 SBs Club, of course: he’s the only one there. You have to go back to the 300 Homers-300 Stolen Bases frat, down the street, to find him some company. There are three other members—Andre Dawson, Willie Mays, and Barry’s father, Bobby Bonds.

Bonds, stepping up to the plate with no one aboard in the very first inning of the Giants’ three-game visit, evoked the customary emotions. Batting left, he crowds the plate, and, with his long legs and fashionably long pants (they now engulf his shoetops, thanks to little elastic straps that slip over his spikes), expectant shoulders, and slightly choked-up, forwardly thrumming black bat, vacuums the available air from the moment. Almost visible were his records and his seventeen years in the majors; as one baseball guy said, “He’s seen every pitch in history.” Boos fell upon him—from apprehension or as character-comment—but they weren’t as loud as those that followed the one, two, three, four straight balls now handed down by Mets starter Steve Trachsel. None of the pitches came near the strike zone; there was no attempt by Trachsel to disguise what was going on. He would take his chances with the rest of the Giants’ order, but Barry was too tough to mess with. This was modern, high-scoring baseball, when single runs don’t matter as much as they did in Babe Ruth’s day. Get used to it.

Bonds drew four more walks and a plunk on the side (another form of free pass) across the remainder of this game and the next two, while the Giants finished their sweep and at last knocked the Mets out of first place. Bonds’s only hit of the series was a solo homer against Pedro Astacio in the finale—a short-stroke flick of the bat that sent the ball over the left-center-field wall—which began a three-run game-tying rally by the Giants. I was watching via television, and while the Mets commentators made much of this dinger and an earlier Mo Vaughn shot off the scoreboard, nobody said anything about a walk to Bonds in his next at-bat beyond oohing over Astacio’s first fling, high and inside, which put Barry in the dirt. None of the next three pitches came close to the strike zone, and the walk moved up a prior base runner, Rich Aurilia, who soon became the winning run. Bonds was unperturbed by the knockdown. “Who’s winning?” he said to the reporters in the clubhouse.”That’s all that matters.” It was the only visit to Shea that the Giants and Bonds will make this year, but, thanks to interleague play, he will be unexpectedly on view at Yankee Stadium on June 7th, 8th, and 9th—back for the bullfight or the baseball.

John Franco, the Mets captain and famous reliever, was lounging on a dugout step just after the early Bonds press conference, and when someone repeated Barry’s “I don’t have enough games in my body to get there” line to him he made a dismissive little violin-playing gesture. Old pros are hard on each other, and Franco had something nearer than Hank Aaron on his mind. The next day, Mets general manager Steve Phillips broke the bad news: an MRI had disclosed that Franco’s medial collateral ligament and flexor tendon had pulled loose from the bone in his elbow, and that he would require a ligament replacement (the “Tommy John” operation) and a year to fifteen months of rehabilitation if he was ever to pitch again. Franco, who is forty-one, said he was thinking it over. Meeting the writers the next afternoon, he broke down in tears when he told us that, when he’d got home the previous night, after the news was out, his ten-year-old son, J.J., had asked, “Is it my fault because we played catch the day before?”

Franco’s tears and toughness came as no surprise. A five-ten (at best) lefty reliever and stopper, he has compiled eighteen years in the majors and four hundred and twenty-two saves on attitude and a cutter. No fastball. He’s a local guy all the way, the son of a city sanitation worker and a product of Lafayette High and St. John’s University. Watching him at work all this time—he came aboard the Mets in 1990—you understood always that he would be only just good enough for the crisis at hand. Even when he closed the deal—got rid of the last batter of the day on a changeup and came down off the mound yelling and punching the air—he looked more human than triumphant: a Met like the rest of us, living out his wildest dream. Catching him again here, perhaps for the thousandth time, I saw that his snapping dark eyes, the cool little head loll, the tongue that rolls out in the middle of a laugh, the dismissive “Naah!,” and the rest—clean-line haircut and a downturned dark mustache—were all New York, but of a kind we know better now than we used to. He’s a firefighter.

Franco decided to have the operation and hopes to rejoin the Mets by July or August next year. I hope he can do it, too, but I wish even more that he’d stop now and let himself up a little. Grant Roberts, a twenty-four-year-old bullpen teammate of Franco’s, said, “I’ve loved just seeing him here every day,” which is my thought exactly. My Mets friends Gerry and Barbara and Peter and Brooke and my wife, Carol, and I will talk about Franco in the stands at Shea, while things go from worse to worse. The other day, Alomar and Ordóñez pulled off a breathtaking play behind second base against the Colorado Rockies—a behind-the-back flip from Robbie to the outstretched Rey. Two innings later, Ordóñez made a throwing error, and then Alomar threw a routine double-play toss past Mo Vaughn at first. Vaughn, Mike Piazza, and Edgardo Alfonzo, the heart of the order, recently combined for one hit in twenty-six at-bats. The Mets have lost eight of nine games, to reach the .500 level: official mediocrity.

Baseball weirdness abounds—the Marlins drew a home crowd of 5,461 the day they took over first place in the N.L. East—and attendance is seriously down in nine big-league cities. Maybe gloomy Bud Selig is right. Everybody wants to see a winner but we only want a win. Baseball at Shea gives you a lot of between-time, and we’re working on Mr. Met’s love life, and our all-time team made up of players with girls’ names—Pete Rose, Mark Grace, Babe Ruth, and this guy on the Brewers Mark Loretta, and the rest—and what do you suppose happens to marriages that begin with those scoreboard proposals: “Cheryl Will You Marry Me?” Let’s go, Mo. ♦

Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956.